The Death of Nostalgia

1688 - 2024. Killed by Over Exposure to the Absence of Meaning

Oct 24, 2024

Self portrait. Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto. 2022

Prologue

Less than 24 hours elapsed between (mistakenly) thinking this thing was finished, and the time I set aside to edit it. During that time something happened that simultaneously proved my point and fucked up my rhythm. What happened was this: 3 articles regarding nostalgia, a subject that has preoccupied my thoughts and my journal for a decade, appeared on the homepage of The Guardian.

Like any publication (online or offline), The Guardian has to compete in a flooded market, for the ever dwindling attention of an increasingly fractured and atomised audience. Their marketing team will have access to mountains of analytics and data, highlighting which writers and topics are getting the most engagement. That insight will inform editorial decisions, especially in terms of which articles to prioritise on the homepage. Unsurprisingly, this isn’t the first time a flurry of nostalgia-themed articles have sprung up on The Guardian. In the 10 years since I first started writing about the topic, the paper has published 673 articles related to nostalgia.1 Evidently it’s a staple subject in mainstream media and undoubtedly resonates with a large, captive audience.

Of the 3 articles that derailed my flow, Zoe Williams’ “Horniness, hedonism and hope: why Rivals makes me surprisingly nostalgic”2 represents the lowest hanging fruit (for want of any other phrase, sorry) in terms of nostalgia clickbait. Rivals is a new adaptation of a Jilly Cooper shagfest, replete with the in-built opportunity to once again revive the fashion, music and “greed is good” excesses of the 1980s. In this context I would argue that it is incredibly unsurprising that a 50 year old writer might feel the pang of nostalgia, when confronted with a piece of media honed to precision with the express intention of evoking that exact emotion. Given that I am concerned with the negative effects of over producing, over consuming and over valuing nostalgia media, this trite bit of hack work raised my hackles.

The entries from Sam Freedman3 and Miranda Sawyer4 are ostensibly promotions for their books which, on this evidence, aren’t going to be adding value to the discourse about politics or Britpop respectively.

In this case, The Guardian is an example of how nostalgia, a human emotional response, has been commodified to the level of an industrial complex. While nostalgia has long been a propaganda tool for politicians and advertisers to manipulate their audiences, the Internet has accelerated the process to the point of suffocation. And now nostalgia is dead, killed by overexposure to the absence of meaning.

A short, de rigueur introduction to the history of nostalgia

The word nostalgia was coined in the 17th century by Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer, to describe the maladies of displaced people (usually soldiers), yearning for home. This diagnosis continued for some time and nostalgia was viewed as an illness or disease to be cured. While nostalgia is still associated with longing or yearning for a time or a place in the past, its social connotations have become less negative. Nostalgia may have always reflected collective memory, as much as the personal, but the current mass proliferation of nostalgia, as a cornerstone of internet culture, is something of a phenomenon. A phenomenon that is dependent, however, on how organic the feeling is, among the millions of people engaging in online performance of such a visceral emotion.

Unreflective nostalgia can breed monsters

The cultural theorist Svetlana Boym posited a theory of “two main types of nostalgia: the restorative and the reflective [...] Restorative nostalgia does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition. Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity.”5

In his second book on the subject of nostalgia, The Hours Have Lost Their Clock, author Grafton Tanner describes Boym’s distinction as, “Restorative nostalgia wants to reclaim the things that have been lost, by any means necessary, and it does not accept the futility of such an endeavor [...] it tends to pair well with racism, prejudice, xenophobia and colonialism. Reflective nostalgia doesn’t take itself so seriously.”6 Later Tanner highlights the limits of any attempt at reducing an emotion to even a handful of distinctions. Nostalgia, like any emotion, has many flavours. The flavour of Boym’s restorative distinction, however, is particularly redolent in the current political and cultural climate.

Restorative nostalgia is analogous to the term “pathological nostalgia”, coined in a paper by Harvey Kaplan. “In pathological nostalgia, there is a longing for the past without the acceptance that it is over. In this sense, it becomes a screen function in which the objects of nostalgic attachment are condensations of childhood values, derivatives of early fantasies that are used to idealize the past, preventing movement toward the future.”7

While there may be many flavours of nostalgia, the way nostalgic content is distributed and shared online, would suggest that restorative or pathological nostalgia is the dominant expression of the emotion, in our current time.

The New Rock Revolution will not be monetised

Emotions like nostalgia are not enabled to proliferate unless they can be commodified. The cyclical nature of trends and fashions are testament to our collective inability to let go of the past as it slips through our fingers. To preserve the past in amber, we must rampantly regurgitate, productise and repackage it as a physical reflection of how we present our personalities as signs and signifiers of individual status within society. For this merry-go-round to keep up with the pace of cultural shifts in the internet age, nostalgia cycles are shortening to the degree that we partake in a collective gaslighting of our recent memory, or risk being exiled from the trend. Take “Indie Sleaze” for example. Indie sleaze is the recent rebranding of an early 2000s aesthetic mostly characterised by the bands of that era, like The Libertines and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The most ardent indie sleaze nostalgists could be described as ironically reflective, not shying away from the contradictions of modernity. But often these fans are unable to accept or reflect on the speed at which the corpse of a 21st century trend has been reanimated with supposedly renewed relevance. The term “gatekeeper” is used to shoot down anyone who dares remind the indie sleaze apologist that nobody called it that at the time. Commodities have to bear meaning to be valued and the mark of nostalgia just adds extra weight to the carat. The closest thing that era had to a contemporary label was “the new rock revolution” which sounds faintly embarrassing when compared to its sleazy rebrand. The brutal truth of indie sleaze is fully laid bare by Daniel Dylan Wray in The Quietus, “With indie sleaze, there appears to be little else going on other than some people wallowing in the past while trying to convince themselves that it, or maybe even them, possesses some sort of contemporary relevance”.8 What also shouldn’t be ignored, is that the main contributors to that scene were themselves nostalgic magpies. Any of the music or fashions of that time were directly inspired by a combination of 70s/80s post punk (the rifs and the jeans), or 90s britpop (the swaggering masculinity and cosplay decadence). Britpop, of course, was just a repackaging of the 60s and 70s “British invasion”. This isn’t to say that valuable or worthwhile art or memories were not made during these periods, but it’s easy to overstate that value. Indeed, a contemporaneous term was coined by people who lived through the 90s and early 2000s to describe the amount of disposable music churned out during that era: Indie Landfill. By comparison “invasions”, “revolutions” and “sleaze” are each favourable ways of misremembering the past in order to sell reunion tour tickets at hugely inflated prices.

Nostalgia is a weapon

“Today what we are experiencing is the absorption of all virtual modes of expression into that of advertising. All original cultural forms, all determined languages are absorbed in advertising because it has no depth, it is instantaneous and instantaneously forgotten. Triumph of superficial form, of the smallest common denominator of all signification, degree zero of meaning, triumph of entropy over all possible tropes. The lowest form of energy of the sign. This unarticulated, instantaneous form, without a past, without a future, without the possibility of metamorphoses, has power over all the others. All current forms of activity tend toward advertising and most exhaust themselves therein”.9

Advertising is capitalist propaganda, where anything that can be commodified can be weaponised. In that sense, synthesising nostalgia is psychological warfare. The nostalgia boom is not occurring in a vacuum, but it is creating one. Political movements at both ends of the spectrum and advertisers alike target pliable audiences yearning for a fantasy of simpler times, bludgeoning them with an inescapable barrage of pathological, restorative nostalgia bait.

At the start of 2024 market research company Ipsos published a report titled “Why is nostalgia so ‘fetch’ right now?”10 According to this report 54% of 16-24 year olds, and 59% of 55-74 year olds globally, agree that ‘I would like my country to be the way it used to be’. It also states that 44% of British people agree that ‘given the choice, I would prefer to have grown up at the time when my parents were children’. A passing nod to Zygmunt Bauman’s term “retrotopia”, gives the report a sprinkle of intellectual pretence, but is otherwise preoccupied with affirming ways that advertisers and marketers can weaponise nostalgia as a commercial tool. For that reason there is no acknowledgement of the obvious, dissonant contradictions lying beneath the surface of those numbers. 16 and 74 year olds agreeing that they would like their country to be the way it used to be, will have very different ideas of what that means. In both cases, it’s difficult to argue that either grew up in an era that is significantly better (or worse) than our current one. Transport a 16 year old from anywhere back to 2008 and they will find themselves on the precipice of adulthood just as the global economy suffers its worst crash since World War II. 74 year olds yearning for 1950 have conveniently forgotten they were born during the cold war, the Korean war and the expulsion of Palestinian and Bedouin people from their own lands, by occupying Israelis. The same logic applies to British respondents choosing to live during the time when their parents were children, will be confronted with equivalent existential and tangible threats to contend with, along with a swathe of people who will say, without irony or or introspection, that things were better in their day. As a method of proliferating propaganda, restorative nostalgia is a highly effective hereditary bloodline. As each generation is duped into reviving the corpse of a fictional past through consumerism, we inch toward what Mark Fisher called “the slow cancellation of the future”.

Taken for a ride

In 2006 a poll of 1000 British people concluded that The Bike Ride is the nation’s favourite advert.11 First aired in 1973 the 47 second segment, directed by Ridley Scott, depicts a young boy pushing a bike up a steep, cobbled hill, burdened with a basket full of bread to be delivered. The bucolic, sepia toned scene is scored by a colliery band wheezing through Dvořák's Symphony No. 9 "From the New World" and a buttery thick voiceover, with an accent that could conceivably come from anywhere between Kingsteignton and King’s Lynn. The articles referenced in the Wikipedia entry12 for The Bike Ride are all at pains to point out the common misconception that the advert was filmed in the North of England (it was actually filmed in the South West), perhaps due to the indeterminate voiceover accent and the connotations of brass bands being a northern staple, though none seem to mention that Scott was also born in the North. In this case, questions of provenance are beside the point, as the advert and the bread present a wholesome fantasy, when both are actually produced on an industrial scale. Homogeneous stodge masquerading as the artisanal craft of this sceptred isle. In his book Ministry of Nostalgia, Owen Hatherley coined the term “Austerity Nostalgia”, which is an apt name for this genre of advertising that is now ubiquitous, especially in the blockbuster Christmas adverts of high street retailers like John Lewis. Nostalgia is a handy, cheap trick to keep people spending, when they can barely afford to heat their homes during winter.

The absence of relevance

Having worked in the industry for long enough, I know that advertisers and marketers believe that the key to using nostalgia as a tool is “relevance”. I’ve heard this said out loud, and seen it parroted regularly in industry trend reports and the not so great or good of LinkedIn. What they mean is: does our cynical flavour of propaganda manipulate the audience into experiencing a synthetic emotion that will convince them to buy a product in a vain attempt at connecting with an imagined past? In this context, relevance is rendered meaningless. While I don’t doubt that people feel nostalgic when they see, hear or smell something that echoes a past sensation that causes a reverie, relevance and meaning are absent if the source is not wholly organic. Commodified nostalgia is the antithesis of authenticity, another word pummelled beyond meaning by advertisers. Relevance and authenticity are collateral damage in the fight to preserve the status quo, rendered dead on arrival. Again Fisher sums it up well, “those who can’t remember the past are condemned to have it resold to them forever.”13

A case of the X

When “absolute advertising” rules, authenticity, nostalgia and relevance are sacrificed, while endemic misinformation runs amok. Nowhere is this more evident than X.com. At the end of 2023 an interesting dance was performed between X owner Elon Musk and advertisers who decided to boycott the platform. Companies including Apple, Disney and Comcast were boycotting X because of Musk’s increasingly unhinged anti semitic posts on the platform, and the increase of misinformation that appeared alongside their advertisements. Musk announced that he would take legal action, claiming that the boycott would “kill the company”. Both sides were engaged in a purely performative public dispute that posed no threat to the economic status of the entities involved, but did force them to show their hands. Giant corporations like Apple, Comcast and Disney have no qualms about associations with misinformation or racism. They are all part of an industrial complex that gladly hawks cheap nostalgia to sell fantasies and maintain monocultures on a global scale, while exploiting cheap labour in the developing world. The performance of boycotting a specific platform as an advertiser is an easy win when the owner of that platform is acting abhorrently in public. There is also the matter of competition. If advertising is propaganda, then competing with other forms of propaganda, in the forms of racism or conspiracy theories (which are not mutually exclusive), massively devalues the expenditure. Musk, on the other hand, intimated that the financial implications of a boycott might ruin his company. In reality he was pissed off because he needs advertisers on board to legitimise a platform dedicated to hate speech and endemic misinformation. For entropy to triumph, everybody has to play the game.

Autopsy on the Slate

The illusion of authenticity predates the adolescent rebrand from Twitter to X. The Twitter blue tick verification was originally created to indicate "we've been in contact with the person or entity the account is representing and verified that it is approved". Outwardly this was presented as an antidote to misinformation, as users could be certain that profiles were authentic, but the advertising revenue from blue tick accounts meant they proliferated and created a social class on the platform that essentially benefitted users whose authenticity and credibility was synthetically manufactured, by implicitly providing free labour to Twitter, in exchange for a badge of credibility. When Musk bought Twitter and rebranded it to X, he removed legacy blue tick verifications and began to charge users for the privilege, in exchange for prioritising their posts and offering a share of the advertising revenue. While this has eliminated any pretence of authenticity, it has incentivised users with a paid verification to exponentially increase the amount they post, irrespective of the quality or veracity of the information they share. Given that X is now characterised by huge amounts of misinformation (along with the reinstatement of previously banned racist, misogynist, homophobic and anti trans and LGBTQ+ accounts), it is no surprise that a raft of accounts specialising in pop-culture nostalgia clickbait, are creating an alternate history in an attempt to resell it. As reported by Coleman Spilde in The Slate, these accounts are racking up hundreds of thousands of likes and shares, despite their posts having no basis in fact or reality. As with Indie Sleaze, it might seem innocent enough to post about Beyonce and Lady Gaga to purposefully synthesise nostalgia by reinventing the recent past but, as Spilde ascertains, “while our ability to correctly identify misinformation, propaganda, and hearsay isn’t gone entirely, it is dwindling.”14 This dwindling ability to identify when nostalgia is being weaponised, plays into the hands of populist politicians, technofeudalist CEOs, multi-level marketing tradwives and bands on the reunion cash-grab, all hoping to maintain the status quo. At best it means we’re stuck on a cultural ferris wheel that spins in ever decreasing circles, recycling mediocrity, dripping candy floss puke as Wonderwall plays on a loop. At worst we are duped into believing that the past was a utopian idyll that can only be reclaimed by blaming the most vulnerable people in society for daring to stake a claim to their share of human kindness.

Haunted by a dead franchise

To the Swiss mercenaries Johannes Hofer first diagnosed in the 17th century, nostalgia meant a longing for home in the face of immense suffering and death. In 2024 nostalgia means facing immense suffering in the face of another Ghostbusters reboot while racist nationalists try to overturn elections or reclaim lands that didn’t belong to them in the first place, misled by regurgitated fantasies of a past that is easier to erase and remake. For restorative nostalgists, seeing the past from a messy, incomplete and often unflattering perspective is inconvenient. It takes work that they’re not willing to put in. For reflective nostalgists, I say this: nostalgia is dead. You knew that already, but now there is no ironic enjoyment to be found. Let us all move on and focus our minds on creating a future that is truly worth remembering.

Epilogue

I am not immune to nostalgia and certainly not adverse to indulging in the reverie of a romanticised past. I do, however, know that these memories are as intangible and uncertain as the present and future. I know that spending too long embracing the ghosts of the past can prevent us from seeing the splendour of the moment, let alone imagining the possibility of what comes next.

The source of my cynicism about nostalgia should be clear: I am deeply suspicious of the way it is commodified and weaponised to prevent societies from progressing, politically, culturally and environmentally. Collectively we have over indulged in a fantasy while the most nefarious, powerful people in the world move on with the business of shitting on reality.

The first time I attempted to gather my thoughts on this subject was in 2014, when BBC Radio 6 celebrated 20 years of Britpop with a galling lack of self awareness and a large dollop of self aggrandisement. In the article I was rightly scathing about the influence of the “I Love” series of BBC TV shows that aired in the early 2000s, as an early example of our cultural lurch into Boym’s “restorative nostalgia”. The set-up is a now familiar staple of cheap primetime TV slop: an array of talking heads (mostly motor mouthed minor celebrities and minor hacks), yap with authoritative abandon about cultural ephemera from a bygone era. Inferring throughout that growing up in an era of Rubik’s Cubes, Space Hoppers, Pong and (erm) Jimmy Saville was worth canonising. While it might seem unfair to criticise a show that isn’t trying to be anything other than fluff, the cultural programming of a national broadcaster has a political agenda and, in the early 2000s, genuine influence over its audience. For the past decade I’ve been faintly embarrassed about that piece, but reading it now I’m quite proud of it, particularly with my dissection of the contributors on the I Love stable. This week I couldn’t help but guffaw at the recent article by Miranda Sawyer in The Guardian, where she nominally hawks her contribution to the Britpop discourse bonfire. In the article Sawyer, one of the chief I Love offenders, throws her hack colleagues under the bus for reducing the UKs mid-90s music scene under the Britpop label, conveniently eschewing her vast contribution to the landfill of trash nostalgia journalism. By constantly rewriting recent history, we deceive ourselves and each other. WIth the 90s I understand the temptation to canonise the cultural output of the era. I turned 16 in 1999 and was a captive audience for everything the decade had to offer - good and bad. For every classic album, film or work of art, from any epoch, there’s a literal and figurative landfill of trash that we try desperately to ignore. It is interesting to see the mid-2000s come around into the nostalgia hype cycle, as the trash quota really went up a notch or ten. Seeing posters for Scouting For Girls or The View anniversary tours is a stark reminder of the depths we plumbed during that cursed time. Take it from someone who was there - it wasn’t just the economy that collapsed.

Triumph Of Entropy

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